Welcome to Europe Samuel

I got asked for directions today. The (obviously) American lady stopped me on the street in Helsinki and asked if I spoke English. I thought of answering, ‘No, only Australian,’ but then thought better of it. I was quite taken by the fact that I knew the directions to where she wanted to go. The humorous side of it all is, of course, that I needed to ask for directions from someone only yesterday.

I’ve only lived in the city of my birth for a short while at the very beginning of my life, but somehow Helsinki has had a deep impact on me. It’s one of the great cities of Europe, steeped in a history that at many times has been dark and difficult. Every building has a story and the old narrow alleyways in the centre of the city point to a time before cars and public transport.

Our Samuel was quite taken aback yesterday when on the way to the sauna in the basement of our hotel, we passed a large red iron door. ‘That’s the bomb shelter,’ I casually commented to Samuel. ‘The bomb shelter!’ came Samuel’s stunned reply. ‘Yes, the bomb shelter. Welcome to Europe,’ I replied. That’s part of the ‘dark and difficult’ past of Helsinki’s history, as it tried to navigate its way through a complicated Cold War world in the shadow of the Iron Curtain.

Many of the buildings in the city still display the scars of shelling from World War II. My mum and dad have at different times told stories of bomb raids on Helsinki during the war and of days spent in bomb shelters not dissimilar to the one Samuel saw yesterday. How fortunate we are that Samuel doesn’t need to tell stories of days spent in bomb shelters to his children and grandchildren. And how incredibly sad that so many children still today, live with the fear that so many European children lived with 70-years-ago. Humanity hasn’t learnt much from its mistakes.

For a relatively small and young city (by European standards anyway), Helsinki displays an amazing array of architecture, from neo-classical to neo-renaissance and Art-Nouveau to Nordic Classicism. There’s also some Neo-Gothic and Russian-Byzantine thrown in for good measure. One of my favourite buildings in the city is the Kallio Church, built in the Art-Nouveau tradition. It’s also our ‘family church’ and the church in which I was christened.

That’s where I was headed this morning when I was asked for directions. It sits proudly on a hill about two kilometres from the central railway station and about 200 metres from my childhood apartment. As I climbed the hill up to the Church, the Church bells tolled and I was transported back to my toddler years as I played in the local park in the snow. The Church bells tolled back then, as they had for a Century before that, calling people to worship.

Good, functional and practical design is a way of life in Finland. Minna and I are big fans of Finnish glassware, especially Iittala. We have tried over the years to buy a few pieces from here and there, so you can imagine how we felt when we stepped into an Iittala store, full of the glassware that is so rarely seen and even more rarely for sale in Australia. The Iittala tradition is to create glassware that is not only beautiful to behold, but functional to use.

It’s the dual emphasis on this understated ‘beautiful functionality’ that permeates through all design in Finland, from its glassware, to linen, to furniture and of course to building architecture. No wonder Helsinki was named the World Design Capital in 2012.

The view from our balcony at our apartment hotel, nestled in nature, yet in the city.